M1’s Jake Larson on the future of marketing: how the cloud data warehouse is a game changer

As part of Hightouch’s The Data Warehouse Advantage in Marketing series, we sit down with one of our customers to learn how modern marketing teams think about the future of marketing and where data plays a role. Jake, a MarTech leader at M1, dives into how M1 leverages the cloud data warehouse to knock down data silos, bridge teams, and open new growth opportunities for marketing.

Jeanne (PMM at Hightouch): Great to chat with you, Jake. Can you tell us more about your background: how did you get started at M1?

Jake (Senior Marketing Technology Manager at M1): I've been with M1 for a little over seven years, starting as a web engineer and eventually moving to my current position focusing on marketing technology. My initial work began with architecting and improving our client-facing web application and marketing site.

However, as our products and client base grew, so did our need for improved marketing systems and automation. Noticing this, I shifted my efforts towards building and improving our marketing platforms while ensuring their integration with our internal systems. I now help lead our MarTech teams with the continued goal of providing an excellent experience for our marketers and, ultimately, our clients.

Single Source of Truth for Marketing

Jeanne (PMM at Hightouch): How did you respond to your marketing teams’ needs? Did it start with specific marketing use cases?

Jake (Senior Marketing Technology Manager at M1): Many of our marketing team's technology needs involve integrating data into systems and supporting new communication channels. For example - most of our marketing campaigns require the ability to reach out to our customers and partners through email, push notifications, direct mail, social, phone calls, and paid advertisements. To support these use cases and ensure efficiency, we needed to research and implement multiple external platforms that would integrate well with each other and our internal services.

This was not an easy task, but through the use of an ESP (email service provider), CRM (customer relationship management), MMP (mobile measurement partner), and CDP (customer data platform) - I believe we've landed on a solid technology stack that supports our desired channels and use-cases going forward.

Jeanne (PMM at Hightouch): What were some of the big milestones you needed to hit on the marketing side?

Jake (Senior Marketing Technology Manager at M1): One of the most significant and most recent milestones our marketing team needed to hit involves ensuring reliable and consistent data for segmentation. This was initially a challenge as different groups used separate platforms with their own datasets, leading to segmentation mismatches and clients receiving inconsistent messaging. We needed to knock down our data silos and converge on a single data source of truth if we were to have any hope of solving this problem.

Thankfully, by collaborating with our data and engineering teams, we integrated our internal and external marketing platforms with a cloud data warehouse which now acts as our one-stop shop for all of our segmentation and reporting needs. This change and the addition of Hightouch have enabled our marketers to be much more efficient at creating desired segments, syncing those segments across all our platforms, and ensuring consistent messaging for our customers.

Using a cloud data warehouse as a source of truth for marketing data is a game-changer. It has allowed our marketers to access data more efficiently for segmentation, improved messaging consistency across external platforms, and reduced the complexity of our data pipeline. Overall, a massive win for our teams.

The Future of Marketing

Jeanne (PMM at Hightouch): Something we deeply believe and have been seeing in the market is how powerful and immensely beneficial it is to leverage the data warehouse for marketing. Do you think the future of marketing is the data warehouse?

Jake (Senior Marketing Technology Manager at M1): Yes, I believe the future of marketing lies in using a data warehouse. Our evolution in marketing technology and data pipeline at M1 directly reflects its benefits. The lack of a source of truth for data creates a big struggle for marketing teams, and it only gets more prevalent and difficult to deal with as an organization grows. My recommendation to marketers would be to push their company towards leveraging a cloud data warehouse so they, too, can remove their own data silos and begin to see the same benefits our teams have enjoyed since making the transition.

Jeanne (PMM at Hightouch): Thank you, Jake, for sharing your insights with the Hightouch team.

Want to Learn More?

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can unlock the power of your cloud data warehouse for marketing, read our blog post or talk to one of our experts today.